Sat 26 Oct 2019
C. S. CHALLINOR – Phi Beta Murder. Rex Graves #3. Midnight Ink, trade paperback; 1st printing, 2010.
This one had the allure of featuring a well grounded albeit amateur detective, by which I mean one who’s not a gourmet cookie shop owner first, and a solver of mysteries only as the occasion arises — the case being a locked room mystery to boot. Neither promise was quite fulfilled, but the story was interesting enough for me to stay with it through to the end.
The detective is Scottish barrister Rex Graves, whose previous two adventures I have not read. (There are now eleven novels and two novellas.) He’s in Florida where his son Campbell is in college, and in whose dormitory another student is found hanged to death in the room directly above.
The school authorities want this incident chalked up as a suicide — the doors and windows were all locked from the inside — but the boy’s parents ask Graves to learn more, if he can. [Plot Alert] The locked room aspect is not played up, and is eliminated very quickly when Rex obtains some plans of the building and sends Campbell up through the duct work to obtain the dead boy’s computer.
There is a little bit of hand-waving going on here. How would a visiting father have the clout to obtain such building plans so quickly to be of any use to him? The relationship that exists between father and son is a lot more interesting, and so are the problem Rex has with his love life. His current girl friend is upset that his former lover has followed him to Florida, and when the latter is rejected, she tries to commit suicide herself.
But I don’t read mysteries in which the love triangles therein are more key to the story than the mystery. Challiner’s writing style is smooth and breezy, but I didn’t find enough at the core of this one to be tempted to read another.
October 26th, 2019 at 8:15 pm
You and I seem to have the recurring conversation about why anyone would want to write a mystery that doesn’t really pay much attention to the mystery.
I have no problem with the characters having lives and complications, but those shouldn’t really trump the reason you wrote a mystery in the first place.
I remember when critics complained about all the business in Sara Woods Anthony Maitland novels about his wife and uncle and their lives or Roger West’s kids in John Creasey’s novels. Imagine what they would say today where so many mystery novels seem to be a soap opera or situation comedy with brief forays into mystery.
October 26th, 2019 at 8:50 pm
Times change, David, and I don’t see any reason to have an organization such as Sisters in Crime around any more. I think more mysteries are written by women and/or for women than by men for men, not including action adventure thrillers, and C. S. Challinor is both female, and I’m sure even though her series has a male protagonist, more women read her books than men read do.
I suppose that sounds sexist, and I don’t mean it to be. From the number of the books in the series (see below) she’s doing very well with them. While her books are not intended for you or me, she has a formula that’s certainly working for her.
The Rex Graves series —
1. Christmas Is Murder (2008)
2. Murder in the Raw (2009)
3. Phi Beta Murder (2010)
4. Murder on the Moor (2011)
5. Murder of the Bride (2012)
6. Murder at the Dolphin Inn (2012)
7. Murder at Midnight (2014)
8. Murder Comes Calling (2015)
9. Prelude to Murder (2015)
10. Judgment of Murder (2016)
11. Upstaged by Murder (2018)
Plus two novellas:
Say Murder With Flowers (2013)
Say Goodbye to Archie (2013)
October 28th, 2019 at 2:15 am
Cozies are popular and I don’t mean to talk down to their fans. It’s a successful genre and has as much right to exist as any other, and some ply it better than others and with more success, it just seems from a strictly old white dude perspective that the equivalent of the genre, and it as always been with us, used to have more interest in the actual mystery element, this from a reader who spent many an hour in the company of Mignon G. Eberhart, Phyllis Whitney, Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart, Ethel Lina White,Elizabeth Peters,Elizabeth Saxnay Holding,Mary Higgins Clark,David Frome, and read a fair amount of Mary Roberts Rhinehart, Patricia Wentworth, Tiffany Thayer, and Carolyn Wells who had primarily female followings and fans.
Ironically some of the women horror fantasy writers who use many mystery and suspense novel techniques seem much closer in style to those writers I recall once dominating the distaff side beyond the classic models of Christie, Allingham, Sayers, and Marsh.
The cozy element in the cozy has just seemed to get a bit out of hand, though it could be said in the late eighties and nineties the hard-boiled mystery reached a point where some writers seemed to have forgotten the whole point of their protagonists being detectives.
I suppose it is the curse of any popular genre. But I have noticed that the cozy hasn’t done particularly well on the small screen with even some of the series on Lifetime and other channels aimed at women feeling as if they have to provide more in the way of mystery in a style much closer to the mainstream mystery or at least the MURDER SHE WROTE model. For whatever reason the cozy hasn’t translated all that well to the small screen.
What the cozy mystery has that doesn’t seem to be true of other sub genres are dedicated fans who buy tons of books. It’s one reason the the romance section and juvenile sections at stores like Wal-Mart are twice as big as the narrowing mainstream fiction section (other than bestselling names science fiction and mystery aren’t represented, and Westerns only by L’Amour reprints or William Johnstone’s clones). Their readers buy books. If they weren’t selling they would be dominating the shelves. All the whining in the world can’t get around that.
But I reserve the right to have the rare “get off my lawn, you damn kids!” moment, I’m old and I earned it.